Yext Hires Executives Wendi Sturgis and Nishant Mani as it Accelerates PowerListings Growth

New York, NY (PRWEB) August 02, 2011

Yext, the rapidly growing business listings company, announced that it has made two key additions to its executive team, Wendi Sturgis and Nishant Mani. This announcement comes on the heels of its recently raised $10 million in Series D funding from WGI Group, Sutter Hill Ventures and Institutional Venture Partners.

Joining the team today is Wendi Sturgis as Executive Vice President of Sales. Sturgis joins Yext from Yahoo!, where she was Vice President of Account Management for North America. At Yahoo!, Sturgis was responsible for all aspects of Yahoo!’s account management including search, display, video, local and mobile advertising. Sturgis joined Yahoo! as a member of the Right Media Leadership team following the Yahoo! acquisition of Right Media.

“We believe that Yext PowerListings, which synchronizes and enriches organic listings for large and small businesses, has immense potential to help large brands whose thousands of locations make the ‘listings problem’ even harder to manage. Wendi’s tremendous experience working with the largest US national brands and her understanding of their marketing challenges will be instrumental in helping us expand our business among large brands,” said Yext President Brian Distelburger. “I am thrilled to be joining a company such as Yext that has a fantastic product that solves a major pain point for national brands, and rejoin forces with my old friend (and Yext Chairman) Mike Walrath,” Sturgis added.

Yext also recently hired Nishant Mani as Vice President of Marketing, to spearhead its direct acquisition effort for its PowerListings product, as well as build its brand as a leader in business listings. Mani joins Yext from Capital One, where was Director of Online Marketing in their US Card business. “Nishant brings a wealth of online marketing expertise, with a strong focus on data and analytics. There are 20,000,000 businesses in the US that can benefit from PowerListings, and Nishant is going to make sure that each one of them knows how we can help,” said Yext CEO Howard Lerman. Mani added, “Yext has a slam dunk product in a wide open space, with a team that has years of experience solving such problems. This is any marketer’s dream, and I’m glad to be taking on this challenge.”

At Capital One, Mani oversaw its online direct acquisition channels, and leveraged large data-based online advertising analytics to build a massive online marketing portfolio for its card businesses. Mani gained expertise in the company’s information-based strategy across many lending practices. He also serves on the board of advisors for Adsafe Media, the online brand safety technology startup.

Yext hired Sturgis and Mani to bolster its executive team as it sets out to expand PowerListings, which solves the huge problem of allowing businesses to manage their listings across a variety of different sites and mobile platforms.

About Yext

Yext (http://www.yext.com) is making business listings simple with PowerListings, a technology that synchronizes and enriches organic business listings across a network of premium sites and mobile apps. With Yext PowerListings, large and businesses can quickly and easily update their business listings from one central location. Today, over 4,000 businesses trust Yext PowerListings to synchronize their listings. The company was founded in 2006 by Howard Lerman, Brian Distelburger and Brent Metz.

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